“If My servants ask thee about Me, lo, I am near” (Kor. =2=. 182); “We (God) are nearer to him than his own neck-vein” (=50.= 15); “And in the earth are signs to those of real faith, and in yourselves. What! do ye not see?” (=51.= 20-21). It was a long time ere they saw. The Moslem consciousness, haunted by terrible visions of the wrath to come, slowly and painfully awoke to the significance of those liberating ideas. The verses which I have quoted do not stand alone, and however unfavourable to mysticism the Koran as a whole may be, I cannot assent to the view that it supplies no basis for a mystical interpretation of Islam. This was worked out in detail by the Sūfīs, who dealt with the Koran in very much the same way as Philo treated the Pentateuch. But they would not have succeeded so thoroughly in bringing over the mass of religious Moslems to their side, unless the champions of orthodoxy had set about constructing a system of scholastic philosophy that reduced the divine nature to a purely formal, changeless, and absolute unity, a bare will devoid of all affections and emotions, a tremendous and incalculable power with which no human creature could have any communion or personal intercourse whatsoever. That is the God of Mohammedan theology. That was the alternative to Sūfism. Therefore, “all thinking, religious Moslems are mystics,” as Professor D. B. Macdonald, one of our best authorities on the subject, has remarked. And he adds: “All, too, are pantheists, but some do not know it.”